Grade – Headfirst Straight To Hell
(Victory)

Who would have thought that Burlington’s tough guy emo-core crew were really closet Dungeons & Dragons gamers? Surely this is the only way to explain the gruesome fantasy cover artwork that adorns their new release, “Headfirst Straight To Hell”. Not to mention the fact that the album contains songs with names like “The Sixth Chamber”, “Twenty Moons” and “In The Wake Of Poseidon”. Either these titles are the product of fantasy role-playing geekiness, or the band has been listening to too much Danzig lately. I’m not quite sure which.

Dismissing the ridiculous imagery as a joke, my first impressions of the music on the album is that they haven’t really changed much. The same basic Grade formula seems to apply, with the familiar jagged guitar crunch and the distinct strangled vocals of singer Kyle Bishop in your face right off the bat.

A good chunk of the album hurtles by and sounds mostly like a watered down version of Under The Radar. Although there are some catchy riffs, they usually end up getting repeated ad nauseaum, until they aren’t catchy anymore. The music isn’t horrible, but the songs are all basically interchangable, and easily forgettable.

There is clearly an intentional heavy metal influence on the songs though, and this becomes more apparent as the album wears on. About halfway through the album, the song “Vertical Transmission” ends with an extended guitar solo. Not a bad-ass heavy metal finger-tapping solo, but a spacey prog rock kind of solo. This sounds odd, but it isn’t until the end of the album that things get really weird.

First there is the floaty instrumental “The Empress”, which is basically just two guitars with flanger effects jamming for three minutes.

This is followed by “Twenty Moons”, a song that juxtaposes a tortured screaming chorus with cheesy mellow verses. My guess is that it was supposed to sound a lot more epic than it really does.

The album then concludes with a song called “The Glorious Dead”, which is 12 minutes of ominous noises and faint brooding organ, a la Type-O-Negative, eventually taken over by dreamy guitars (again with the damn flanger effects) before fading to silence. Did I miss something here?

This is definitely some strange ground for Grade to be treading on. It’s not really metal… I’m not quite sure what to call it. Either way, it sounds very pretentious, and completely throws off the rest of the album.

Is it possible that a new guitarist and drummer set Grade off down these strange paths? Or can we chalk it all up to a simple roll of the 12 sided die? I’m not sure, but I do know that this is one band I will probably never be able to take seriously again. — Sean